39 Rabbit Holes So Good People Lost Track Of Time

The most interesting rabbit hole I’ve ever fallen down is one that sounds super boring at first but gets kind of creepy the more you dig: everyday stuff that’s secretly built to last forever… but companies don’t exactly advertise it.

It started when I was wondering why some $2 plastic peeler from the dollar store somehow outlives the fancy $50 ones. One late-night scroll turned into reading old forum threads about planned obsolescence versus things that just accidentally refuse to die. People were posting photos of 30-year-old toasters still working perfectly next to brand-new ones that break after a year.

Then I found out there are whole categories of super-durable, plain-looking items that brands keep kind of quiet because if everyone knew how long they actually last, repeat sales would tank.

A few examples that blew my mind:
• That classic black-handled OXO Good Grips vegetable peeler? Basically unchanged since the early 90s. The blade is Swedish steel sharpened at this perfect angle. Knife nerds and people who restore old tools have tested it against $200 Japanese peelers and it still wins on longevity.

• Old Stanley vacuum bottles (the green ones from way back) hold their seal way better than most new Thermoses. Collectors hunt vintage ones on eBay because the newer versions use thinner metal and cheaper parts to save money.

• Zippo lighters. The windproof design hasn’t changed since the 1930s. Drop one in water, run it over with a car, whatever — it’ll still light.

• Even certain black outdoor zip ties (the UV-resistant industrial kind) last 20+ years in the sun and rain, while the cheap ones you buy for home projects snap in months.

The wild part is that some companies seem to hide the really durable versions behind boring packaging on purpose. If word got out that a $4 peeler could outlast three $40 ones, the whole premium market would take a hit. So they let the good stuff spread slowly through word of mouth while flooding the shelves with versions designed to fail just quietly enough to avoid lawsuits.

From there it just keeps going:
• Subreddits full of people hunting “buy it for life” socks, underwear, even toothbrushes

• Discussions about why we don’t have laws forcing things to last longer

• Vintage repair communities figuring out exactly why 1970s appliances still work while new ones burn out fast

• The dark little twist: a lot of modern products are engineered for “just long enough” durability — long enough to dodge class-action suits, short enough to keep you coming back

Now I can’t help it. Every time I grab some random thing in the kitchen or garage, I flip it over like I’m looking for secret clues. Is this the immortal version or the disposable one? It’s turned shopping into this quiet little detective game. And yeah, it’s made me weirdly attached to anything that’s actually well made.

How many similarities there are between Trump and biblical descriptions of the Antichrist.

I was curious why Sarah Palin, who is from Alaska, spoke with such a pronounced Midwestern accent. I discovered that in 1935, the government moved 200 Midwest farm families to the area around Wasila to start farms and revitalize the area. And because it’s such an isolated area, very little has changed linguistically over the past 100 years.

LordHowk:

Hi. I’m from Wasilla, 4th generation Alaskan, I’ve known Sarah and the family since the 80s. The accent wasn’t there until the political ambitions showed up. It’s a folksy affectation that I now believe she’s stuck with.

Rabies.

Reading about how you get infected, the crazy symptoms, the fact that it is 100% deadly once you experience the first symptom, the fact that a doctor developed a bonkers treatment that has worked multiple times so maybe it isn’t 100% deadly, the fact that there’s a lot of evidence his treatment didn’t work at all and maybe rabies was never 100% deadly. We really don’t know a lot about it at all because there’s an effective vaccine and so few people die of it that there isn’t a ton of research money…

And if that wasn’t enough, then I got into the history of rabies and Louie Pasteur and the crazy story of how he developed the vaccine. Which is a rabbit hole in itself.

Now when I’m at gatherings I just wait for someone to bring up rabies because it’s all I want to talk about. Sadly, no one ever does. So I just sit in the corner, by myself, blowing spit bubbles and whispering “some members of a tribe in Peru seem to be naturally immune and researchers can’t explain how.”.

I was trying to figure out what my Russian orphanage was called. Ended up finding out that my parents went through an organization that was shut down for human trafficking allegations. Found out all of my extended family from a DNA test are located in Finland.

The idea that most of what you call your “personality” is just branding you accidentally committed to.
You think you’re introverted. Or ambitious. Or lazy. Or disciplined. But if you rewind far enough, most of it traces back to random reinforcement loops.
You got praised for being “the smart one” once. So you leaned into it.
You got embarrassed speaking up once. So you leaned out of it.
You had one win in the gym. Now you’re “into fitness.”
One bad social phase. Now you’re “not a people person.”
At some point you stopped experimenting and started defending the character.
And here’s the twist: your brain hates inconsistency more than it hates being wrong. So once you say “this is who I am,” it will quietly filter your behavior to match that identity.
You don’t act a certain way because that’s who you are.
You are that way because you kept acting it out.
Then you notice something darker. Entire internet subcultures are just identity accelerators. Pick a label, join a tribe, absorb the script. Suddenly your humor, opinions, even your anger patterns sync up with thousands of strangers.
It feels authentic.
But it’s patterned.
The real rabbit hole is realizing how much of you is inertia.
And the spiciest part?
If identity is that plastic, you could rewrite huge parts of yourself. But that would mean admitting the current version isn’t fixed. And that’s uncomfortable.
It’s way easier to defend the character than to redesign it.
That realization messed with me way more than any cosmic theory ever did.

The “lost media” rabbit hole.

People spending years tracking down obscure TV episodes, deleted songs, or old internet clips that barely anyone remembers and sometimes actually finding them. It’s weirdly wholesome detective work.

Ten years ago I dug up clay in my neighborhood and made pots with it. The clay here is bad, no one does that. Because I went deeper I found that by collecting the right stuff it wasn’t so bad. Processing it right made it better still. The clay is also junk because it melts below decent stoneware temperatures. Because I went deeper I found it becomes like stoneware just before it melts, a sweet spot (vitreous at cone 02 for the ceramic geeks). Hard, strong, rings like porcelain. It’s black, iron rich. It will attract a magnet. I’m still making pots with it. Nothing has captivated my attention so intensely for so long.

I learned there was a brick plant here (Anchorage) for a couple years, in the fifties. Bricks are a bad idea in Alaska. Too many earthquakes, and the freeze-thaw cycle is demanding. A failed business. The 1964 earthquake liquified the entire neighborhood it was in and carried it into Cook Inlet. One more reason the clay is lousy, it’s thixotropic. Jiggle it around and it becomes fluid. Awful for trying to make pots from, worse to build a neighborhood on. I went deeper. The ratio of silt to clay in a sample changes that property. That goes back to collecting the right stuff. I learned to differentiate silty clay from clayey silt. Plasticity, conchoidal fractures.

I learned the Russians made a brick plant on Kodiak Island and another in Nikiski when they were attempting to colonize Alaska.

And on and on. All I wondered is if I could make pottery with the clay in my neighborhood. Now I’m that crazy guy down the street with 1000 pounds of mud piled in the driveway and a kiln in the backyard who is happy to tell you all about it.

Showtimes 4 part documentary on the Reagans. When I learned everything weve been taught in america since the 80s is a lie. .

Astronomer here! My life is basically a bunch of rabbit holes that I somehow get paid to think about. :)

Here’s one my students found fascinating recently. One of the closest stars to Earth, just 13 light years away from us, is called Kapetyn’s Star. Despite being so close, however, it’s a weird star in several respects. For one, it orbits the Milky Way retrograde, ie the opposite direction of the Sun and other stars. Second, its composition is completely unlike stars around it, or those from the galactic plane at all.

So what does its composition match? Omega Centauri, the largest of a special kind of star cluster called a globular cluster (basically a big ball of stars). It is *by far* the largest globular cluster- it has like 10 million stars, and those have tens of thousands typically, and is in the halo of the galaxy outside the disk, 16,000 light years from us.

So it begs the question- how the heck did a star from a globular cluster thousands of light years away end up astronomically next door?! Well maybe *it was never a globular cluster at all!* Instead, imagine it was a small dwarf galaxy with millions of more stars that got close to the Milky Way. Countless stars were stripped and cannibalized into our own- enough that Kapetyn’s star isn’t *that* unusual- leaving behind just the core of the original galaxy. You couldn’t ask for a better example of galactic dynamics!

Space is awesome!

The mating habits of prairie voles. Environmental pressures have caused the hormone receptors of prairie voles to lead them towards monogamy while other voles remain promiscuous. The behaviors and hormone receptors are being used to understand human love.

I went down this rabbit hole for eight hours because a man said he was in love with me and I wanted to understand what that meant. 

I am autistic.

This might be more weird than interesting but before Reddit kinda replaced them, I used to be on internet forums. This one time, someone posted an odd thread asking for examples of "cartoon characters getting electrocuted so their skeletons show." No context or reason given. Naturally, I assume this is kink-related and because I can't just let such mysteries be, I decide to Google it.

You're probably assuming I found some weird corner of the internet full of electrocuted skeleton fetishists but...no. Instead I find that this *same person* has visited dozens of forums, copying and pasting this exact same thread over and over. I also find their deviantart page which contains, well, take a wild guess.

And like...that's it. That's all I find. One person so desperate for electrocuted cartoon character pics that they dominate the search results.

It will forever be the drone videos I saw of Epstein island that I found on youtube. Someone who went by the name Rusty Shackleford had multiple videos. It started from afar and each drone video would get closer.

It captured the interior of the temple, showed the workshop area that was underground, had the raid captured on camera to where the agents had to cover the windows while you could see computers being taken, and then had videos of a large move out. I spent so many hours watching these videos and then one day he changed his name to some maga type stuff and flooded the page with maga propaganda. The videos ended up being deleted or removed and I've never seen such great footage since.

How I ended up losing my faith in Christianity. The rabbit hole of the history, archaeology, deception of the church, science, and theology. You are kept far away from reality when growing up in a conservative family. You can’t possibly know how much is hidden until you start getting deeper.

Stephen Hawking's personal life.

It's a lot crazier (and raunchier) than I expected.

saktii23:

My astrophysicist in-laws were in the same dept. at Cambridge with Hawking and were pretty good friends with him and his first wife in the 70's and 80's. They have photo albums full of photos of Hawking and Jane at dinner parties they hosted. They remained friends with Jane and not "Steve" (as they call him) after the divorce because -as they put it- they" lost respect for Steve after he slept with his nurse and refused to give Jane a penny in the settlement even though she had sacrificed her own Phd to take care for him after he got sick." Hawking basically used his newfound fame and wealth to lawyer up and make sure Jane got nothing. Also, when my spouse was a little boy, Stephen Hawking once hit him in the back with his crutch (this was when he could still walk and talk) for pulling bark off of a tree in front of the Astrophysics lab at Cambridge.

Looked up why flamingos are pink. It's the shrimp they eat. But then discovered that zoo flamingos lose their color without special diet supplements. Then learned that in the 1960s, zoos had to figure out the exact shrimp compound or their flamingos would turn white. Ended up reading about color chemistry in animals for 3 hours.

DigNitty:

Scientists breeding Lehman’s Poison-Dart Frog have noticed that the frog loses its toxicity in captivity.
They speculate that it’s the diet they eat. Attempts to recreate a diet that brings back the natural quality have been unsuccessful. The Frog’s diet consists of an estimated 1000+ different insects and so far we don’t know which one or combination facilitates the poison.
They are sold as pets from the lab anyway, so it’s good they’re not toxic.

Looking into what happens with your "recycling".

Tracking misuse of funds by city managers.

The Vatican. 100% The things they own and the information they know is mind-boggling.

Jamaican reggae, they made sooooooo many quality records in the 60s through the 90s it’s staggering.